[Whippet]

That gets to the crux of the matter doesn't it.

If your morals are based on principle, then no matter who the person was, your decision would remain the same.

I believe/hope that I am the type of person who would not take anothers' life no matter what the circumstances because I want to be a person of principle. If there were some situation where I did take a life, then I am not the principled person I think I am.

Take the example of Google and their motto,'Don't be Evil'. It was a nice bit of marketing, but when the value of doing business with a repressive government was high enough, they and other company's apparently had no problems working with said governments to continue the repression of it's citizens.

Now, you may say, Google has left that country. But, it was not due to the moral repugnance they felt about repressing the citizens, but the fact they were under attack by agents/citizens of said government and felt it was no longer in their interest 'financially' to stay.

[nicolas_t]

A bit out of topic, I think on the question of China many people have a black and white view of the situation...

In the case of google, they came to China but actually provided a less censored service than baidu (by writing in the search pages that some results were left out because of censoring thus attracting attention to it)... So in what way was their behavior evil?

Additionnaly, they never started any blogging service in China that would have put them in a situation where they had to give information to the government about political activists (unlike yahoo who gave such information)...

So, I don't think Google did anything evil in that case...

[btmorex]

They traded freedom of speech for ~1.3 billion people for a decidedly limited amount of money. To me that's a moral calculation and they chose money.

[nicolas_t]

In what way did they trade freedom of speech? Did people in China have more freedom of speech before they came to China? Could they have forced the chinese government to limit censoring?

Of course not... The only thing they could do and did is give another reliable search engine that censored less than their competitors...

[JoeAltmaier]

No, I understand it required collusion with China to make it impossible to resolve Google.com to a different search engine. If they did nothing, folks could Google with the same engine the rest of us do. Try to remember, your ancestors may have fought and died to stay free. Google certainly did not extend themselves in any way to promote this ideal. This discussion here is probably not available in China.

[sailormoon]

That is utter hyperbole. Google never had the "freedom of speech for ~1.3 billion people" to trade. They do not and probably never will have anything like that kind of power. I am far from a Google fanboy but if you're going to criticise them, please keep it reasonable.

[btmorex]

That is reasonable. I'm simply asking them to not do business with a repressive government. Maybe, you don't think freedom of speech is important, but I do.

As for what kind of effect they could have: Google is an internationally recognized brand that is most certainly known in China (even without being the dominant search engine). Refusing to do business with China would be hard for the state-run media to explain away.

Of course, I think a lot of people really, really want to believe that Google is different from every single other multinational organization that has ever existed. It's not.

[nicolas_t]

Facebook and Twitter are internationally recognized brand that are blocked in China... Explaining that away is no problem for the Chinese government.

I think the difference between your point of view and my point of view is that I don't see things as completely black...

China is a repressive government and freedom of speech is not allowed there but it's certainly better than it was during the cultural revolution and I think it'll get better...

Now, as someone who lived in China before Google decided to move in the chinese market I can tell you that it was a great news to see them move... Before they were intermitently blocked by the Chinese firewall, a lot of queries were blocked so access to good search engines was not very good...

After Google moved to China, well they had to censor some of the results out but then they would point it out, and connection and access to google was much better...

So for me, it was a net benefit to see google move in China, and I hope that them moving out won't result in their being blocked again...

[btmorex]

Google has ~24 billion in revenue. Twitter is harder to pinpoint but from the sources I've seen it's far less than 50 million. Facebook is somewhere around 400-550 million.

I guess my point is that they aren't even in the same stratosphere. Twitter and Facebook may be international recognized (and clearly I should have differentiated here), but they aren't in any way equivalent to a behemoth like Google.

[btmorex]

Well said. I always thought it was odd that people cheered Google when they pulled out of China even though they only did that because the Chinese government was hacking them (most notably not becase the Chinese government doesn't care about freedom of speech).

[sailormoon]

the Chinese government doesn't care about freedom of speech

Oh, I think the CCP cares very deeply about freedom of speech. Just maybe not in the way that you'd like ; )